When our world began

Did you miss it? Did you remember that we were supposed to never forget?
I admit I only stumbled upon it. On Friday, during history class, I wrote the date at the top of my notebook: 9/11/09.
Something inside me stopped, and I felt hollow. Is this what this date had come to? A moment of recognition and remorse somewhere between lunch and British history?
I remember walking through the seventh-grade hallway after choir class. As I passed every door each teacher was standing still looking up at something, fixed, not talking. What was going on? What was on the TV?
Mrs. Kofler was standing there two feet away from the TV that hung in the corner of the room.
There was a building and it was on fire. “What’s going on?” Silence. We watched as Katie Couric and Matt Lauer explained it to us: a plane had hit a building, a tall building, somewhere in New York City.
Was it an accident? We didn’t know. We were sitting there, being confused and 12 years old in North Bend, Ohio, as a second plane crashed into the other building.
Months later, Dick Cheney would tell the world that 9/11 changed everything. And I would understand what he meant.
In one day, the adult world with all of its uncertainties and moral ambiguities had come and knocked on my door.
I asked my mom – Who was this Ih-sama guy? A bad man.
Instead of American Girl books, I bought “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Middle East,” and asked for a subscription to Newsweek for my 13th birthday.
I was afraid of Anthrax, of small pox, of the plastic knives they served on airplanes.  
Sometimes I’ll look around my political science classes and wonder how many of us were pulled to “Introduction to Middle East Politics” because of that September day. How many of us were set on the track to become civil servants, journalists or historians the moment that plane took off from Boston?  
We are the 9/11 generation, aren’t we? Isn’t that what they made us?
But as is so often the case, for those of us born in the ’80s and ’90s, 9/11 changed everything and nothing.
We grew up. We learned to drive. We graduated from high school. And now, eight years later, we are left only with longer lines at the airport, the remnants of two forever wars and a hole in the New York skyline.  
For those of us who didn’t lose a loved one, who had never been to New York, who could only suffer vicariously, time has been swift to ease the pain.
And now 9/11 is a badge I keep – a story about seventh grade and pre-algebra that I pull out for strangers when they ask me where I was.
Some will say that is bad, that we should always remember. I say it is natural, healthy even, to pause for a stolen moment between classes and remember the day the world as we know it began.